


Let what grow, exactly?

by hillay17



Category: The Lorax (2012)
Genre: Gen, Magic Portals, or whatever, the onceler isnt fucking in it!! get out of here, this is extremely weird and silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:14:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23222326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hillay17/pseuds/hillay17
Summary: Cy the delivery guy is actually a human teenager who gets sucked into a magic copy of The Lorax. The book. It makes little to no sense
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Let what grow, exactly?

The cast list was up. Cy had known this all day, but he’d been in classes and hadn’t had the chance to go look at it. But now it was the end of lunchtime, and he was walking right past the band room on his way to Algebra. He was hoping for the lead, but realistically he was never going to get the lead role, not with him as a junior, and Andrew O’Sullivan being a senior. Andrew always got all the good roles. Cy was secretly excited for the next year when he would be the senior to get everything.  
There was the list! He shoved his way to one side of the hall, to the protest of a couple that was randomly making out right next to it.  
“Can you guys please move? This is my only chance to look at the cast list,” Cy said huffily. The girl flipped him off and pulled her boyfriend to one side without breaking mouth contact. Gross.  
As expected, Andrew had the lead role. Josh Stevens had the comedic sidekick role, also not a surprise, and Jenna Kim was playing the love interest. But none of this was the least bit surprising; he could have told anyone that the night before. Who was he?  
He scanned and scanned until he landed on it. The very bottom of the page listed him as the delivery guy. He remembered from auditions that that character had like three lines.  
God fucking damn it.  
Okay, but that was fine. Next year he would have much more of a shot. Andrew and Josh would be gone, Peter would be gone, and everyone good in his year was a girl. That left him for the leading male parts. Right?  
“Are you done reading that thing? The bell’s about to ring.” Ah, that was Josh behind him.  
“You’re playing the Professor,” Cy said without looking back. “Congrats.” He stalked off to his next class, not waiting to hear whatever stupid comment Josh was going to make.  
The next couple days went by the same way they always did- slowly and boringly, and nothing happened that was worth mentioning. He had a test in Algebra that he got a B in and his little sister gossiped his ear off about her busy and crazy social life. She was so much more popular than him, even though she was only in seventh grade. It kind of pissed him off, even if he was happy for her.  
The day of the first rehearsal came, and for once in his life Cy wasn’t really looking forward to it. He was bitter about the part he’d gotten, and didn’t think the whole experience would be that worthwhile. While Andrew and Josh were practicing their hero/sidekick song or whatever and the rest of them had a break, he snuck off to the side of the stage to text his friend, who’d auditioned but hadn’t gotten a part.  
But before he took out his phone, he noticed a book that had been strewn, badly, over one of the music stands where the techies sat during dress rehearsals. It was a thick picture book, by the looks of it. He picked it up and tried to smooth the bent pages.  
It was The Lorax. Huh. He hadn’t read that book in years and years. Why was it here in the first place? He considered his options. Should he actually read this again? Here and now? He’d always liked the book as a kid, but then again, he certainly wasn’t a kid anymore.  
What else did he have to do? He opened it back up again and started skimming the first couple of pages. But while he was doing so, something really weird happened.  
There was first a very loud sound of wind, so loud that it drowned every other sound out, including the distant piano noises of the rehearsal. Soon the wind sound got so loud that he couldn’t hear anything else but this deafening whistling and whooshing. Was he actually, suddenly going deaf? In another second he couldn’t see anything either. Everything was white and painfully bright and Cy was sure he was dying, somehow, alone backstage at a rehearsal for a play he regretted being in in the first place. This was how it was going to end. Of course.  
But no. The wind sound stopped, and was being replaced by the sounds of people. Lots of people, voices he didn’t recognize, people of many ages all walking by him, by the sounds of it.  
And then color started coming back. Color that was much too bright, and shapes that looked like something out of a- oh no- out of a Dr. Seuss book. Cy put his arm in front of his face to shield himself from the bright sun, and as his eyes adjusted he could see that he really was in some kind of fantastical, cartoon town. Not only that, but several people were staring down at him.  
He realized he was lying on the ground, and quickly got up- or at least tried to. When he did this he realized he was a lot heavier than before, and his center of gravity was all wonky and different. When he got it figured out he tried again to stand, this time succeeding.  
“Can anyone tell me what is going on here?” His voice was completely different! He sounded like a cartoon. That makes sense, I guess, he thought.  
A woman with short brown hair and the softest-looking sweater he had ever seen smiled a little at him. “Are you new?”  
“New?” He still couldn’t get over his voice being so different. And apparently his body was different too? “I don’t know what’s going on. I was just at school and then I picked up a book and…. Did the book have drugs in it? Is that what’s going on?” Cy didn’t have too much experience with drugs. He’d smoked weed exactly once at a friend’s house, and his parents let him drink wine on holidays, but that was it. Was this what LSD was supposed to be like? It seemed too vivid, too perfect.  
“You are new. What’s your name?” The woman asked.  
“Cy. I’m from Washington State. If any of you even know what that means…” he trailed off. If he was hallucinating all of this, what was really going on? Was the woman actually some girl at school, and his brain was just making her look like- sweater woman? Oh God, what if it was Taylor? What if he was talking to freaking Taylor Norris like some kind of crazy person? He needed to figure out what was going on as soon as possible before he socially destroyed himself.  
“You should probably talk to O’Hare, Cy. He’ll give you your role in this world.” The woman’s voice cut through his brain fog. “You’ll get used to all this eventually. Everyone here is pretty stupid, so it gives you a bit of a grace period if you’re gonna act crazy at first.”  
Cy grabbed this woman by the shoulders and stared her in the brown, animated eyes. “Who are you?”  
“I’m Karen. I’m from Washington State too. I’m pretty sure we’re all from the same basic region, because we all came to be in this world because of a magic book.”  
Cy felt dizzy. “Do you by any chance mean The Lorax?”  
“Yeah,” said a man who was standing nearby. “I checked that book out of the library to read it to my kids but when I tried to, I got sucked into this town. Thneedville, they call it.”  
“Th-“ Cy closed his eyes. “This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. What the actual-“ he walked away in a daze, muttering to himself, as someone called out for him to look out for O’Hare, whatever that meant.  
He was wearing white overalls with his name on them, he noticed. He was fat. Not huge, but definitely fatter than the twig he was normally. He prayed silently for whatever drug this was to wear off quickly, because he wasn’t sure he could take much more of this.  
He wandered down an alley without really looking where he was going. It was a lot less Technicolor than the rest of the world so far, which was nice. The greys here were a lot easier on the eyes than the rest of the color palette of this place. Up above him the sky looked fake. Perhaps it was painted on, although this could just be what the world here looked like. Either he had an incredibly vivid imagination (something that had honestly never really been the case) or this was all, somehow, actually happening. This was not something he was thrilled about, but before he could walk too far down the path of pure existential dread and terror, a voice cut into his thinking.  
“Who are you?”  
Another voice, another person, although this voice sounded pretty sharp and angry. He looked up. Shockingly, nobody was there.  
“Down here, jackass!” Cy lowered his head and noticed a tiny man standing maybe waist-height, with an awful bowl cut and eyebrows that were only half there. “Yeah, who are you? I don’t recognize you.”  
“Who’s asking?” Cy shot back, aggressively.  
“O’Hare. I’m in charge here. I’m guessing by your outfit you’re probably one of my delivery people.” Oh great. Even in this strange and unreal version of reality he was a delivery guy.  
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t work for you or anyone else. Well, except my boss at Burger King on Wednesdays and Fridays. But if you could tell me when these drugs or whatever are gonna wear off, that would be great!”  
“Ah, so you’re new. Listen, what do you want in life?” this question caught him off guard. He stopped and thought for a minute.  
“What kind of question is that?”  
“Just try to answer honestly. Your answer will help us all understand why you are here in this rainbow hellscape.”  
“Rainbow… hellscape?”  
“You heard me,” said the man, “I hate it here. But my greatest desire in life is to be the leader of an easily manipulated population, so that’s exactly what I am here. This world somehow grants your greatest wish. It’s supposed to spit you out when you fulfil it, but it hasn’t done that for me, so I don’t think the purpose as it was told to me is exactly right.” The man spoke way too plainly for his words to make so little sense.  
“How the hell do you know all this?” Cy asked.  
“I was the first person to be put into this book, and the lady who checked me out at the library said a super cryptic thing about this book fulfilling my deepest desires or whatever. So I figure she must have been magic and this is some kind of wish-fulfillment world. So I’ll ask again. What’s your greatest desire in life?”  
“Jesus,” said Cy, “That’s a lot you just threw at me. I’m seventeen, so I don’t really, uh, know.” He thought for a minute, really trying to come up with an answer. Apparently this was the way to escape. Or maybe this was all some kind of elaborate weird dream. Either way, what else was he going to do? His purpose, what was it?  
“I guess… to be a good singer and actor? For people to notice me? For my talent to be recognized?”  
The man laughed, a little meanly. “Well then, that’s probably going to be fulfilled here in some way. Sing me something.”  
“Huh?”  
“This world is a musical. Sing.”  
Cy cleared his throat. He hated to admit it, but his singing voice had suffered ever since he’d hit puberty. It might have been a little bit of the reason he hadn’t gotten a good part in the play. Still, if this shady guy was to be believed, this might be his ticket out of this world. He sang a few words of the song he had used as his audition, and to his surprise his voice sounded beautiful. He had a massive range and hit every note with ease.  
“Great. Your voice is lovely,” the man said with a sneer. “You can be a musical leader when we sing songs about how great our town is. I’m guessing you have a lot of questions, so let me take you to my blimp and we can discuss everything else.” Cy opened his mouth to protest, but before he could say anything a gigantic man had come out of nowhere, picked him up, and was now carrying him towards a blimp that was parked on the ground in the distance.  
“What is going on?” Cy screamed. Oof, his voice was beautiful.  
“Don’t freak out, kid. I’m taking you to my blimp.”  
“Okay, but can you tell this guy to put me down, please? I’ll go willingly, Jesus Christ!”  
“Ugh, fine,” said O’Hare. “You took all the fun out of it anyway.”  
When they got inside the blimp it began to rise. “I always like this part,” said O’Hare, “surveying my kingdom.” What was wrong with this guy?  
When they got a bit higher, O’Hare explained several things to Cy. One, that there were only a few people in this world who were real. Most of them were simpleminded and one-dimensional, which this guy apparently liked because it made them easier to manipulate. He told Cy about an old lady who had forgotten that she was from the real world because she’d gotten too absorbed in the one they lived in. This was all too much for Cy.  
“This is so weird, and I don’t know how to respond. Can I just go to bed?” He was still holding out hope that this was some sort of elaborate dream, and generally in dreams, if you went to sleep in the dream, you would wake up. Unless it was Inception. But this wasn’t Inception, right?  
“Sure, no problem, kid, just walk into a random house and it’s yours.”  
“Wait, seriously?” That was really strange, but in the logic of this world, it wasn’t impossible that that was the case.  
“No! Oh my God, it is too easy with you! No, there’s a development of houses for all the real world people that live here. You can live in one of those. I’ll show ya.” Suddenly the blimp careened off in the opposite direction, and Cy felt his stomach turn.  
“Oy!” O’Hare yelled at the driver. “Are you trying to kill us, Steve? Take it easy!”  
The guy muttered an apology and slowed down a bit. Cy looked out the window at the town. It really was beautiful, in a plastic sort of way. Literally. Everything looked like it was made of plastic, and the colors were still hurting his eyes. As they descended, he could see a row of houses that were set apart from the rest by their relative normalcy. All the rest of the houses were very Doctor Seuss in the most stereotypical way, but these ones looked like regular houses- or as much as they could in a world that was literally animated.  
“Here, you’ll need this,” O’Hare said, tossing him a large clothing-shaped bag, like what you use to keep a suit clean. “Go to the center of the houses when you wake up. Someone will tell you what to do.” Cy opened the bag to find another pair of overalls inside, as well as the most dweeby pajamas he’d ever seen. But what could he do? He didn’t exactly have any other clothes.  
They landed with a gentle thud on the grass, and O’Hare waved him off.  
He suddenly found that he was exhausted, and so he went into one of the houses that looked to be unoccupied and searched through the rooms until he found the bed. He put on the stupid pajamas and fell into a deep sleep pretty much as soon as his head hit the pillow.  
He woke up to a deep man’s voice yelling “Cacaw! Cacaw!” As he looked out the window, he could see the sun pop up suddenly with a bounce. Great. What had the guy told him to do? Go to the center of town?  
No, he was supposed to go to the center part of his neighborhood or something. When he looked down he could see a group of people gathering on the grass in the center of the donut-shaped group of realistic houses. He quickly got dressed and went down into the kitchen, which he found fully stocked with all kinds of cereal he had never seen before. Not one for a healthy breakfast, he took out the sweetest-looking one and shoveled it down his throat before changing and careening outside. He didn’t want to miss the instructions.  
“All right everybody, typical day today!” The woman in the pink sweater was standing above everyone with a megaphone, calling out to a small group of maybe fifteen people, who all looked pretty bored. “We sing the opening song as usual, O’Hare’s gonna take a verse in the middle this time. We’ve also included a verse about the parking lot they just put in. We’re going to sing this in a reverent tone to highlight this town’s emphasis on consumerism, which better do something to help Ted achieve his dream.” Everyone mumbled their annoyance.  
“Who’s Ted?” Cy whispered to the woman next to him.  
“You’re new, right?” The woman looked him up and down. She had blond hair that was put into two perfectly round buns on the sides of her head. “Ted is this kid who’s probably supposed to save the world by planting trees or something. We’re all pretty sure he’s the kid who talks to the Onceler from the actual Lorax book. Karen has this theory that if we help him do that, it might help one of us get free too.”  
As she said this, Karen finished her speech, and people began to leave. “Wait,” said Cy, “what am I supposed to do now?”  
“Get in that truck and deliver the air through town!” the blonde woman called to him.  
Deliver…. Air? He didn’t understand, but he went where she pointed. There was a big van filled with empty canisters. What was he supposed to do? He didn’t even have his license yet. Whatever. It was all a cartoon anyway, how hard could it be? He would just do what came naturally.  
The keys were very safely already in the ignition, so he turned it and began driving. Thankfully, before he was ten feet out of the housing circle he ran into another delivery driver, and flagged him down. The man explained to him that they took the empty air canisters (he snorted at that before realizing the guy wasn’t joking) and replaced them with full ones in the machines people had in their houses. The man also explained the actual route to him, which nobody else had done this whole time. Weren’t jobs supposed to train you?  
Oh well. He set off, and pretty soon music started to play, and this seemed to flip some kind of switch. Everyone was very cheery in the first place, but this music really added another layer on top of that. People were dancing in the streets, and Cy felt like there was an extra spring in his step. Pretty quickly everyone was singing together, and somehow he already knew all the words! With no rehearsing at all! It was really a theater kid’s dream right there, and he almost wondered why he didn’t just immediately transport back to the real world right then and there.  
And then he fell into a manhole.  
No joke. He was singing a high note at the front of a parade and then suddenly he was tumbling through the air in the darkness but he still felt so happy, and it was a confusing emotion, and he could still hear the music playing, and then someone was fishing him out. With a fishing pole. Fear was replaced almost forcibly with the joy of singing once again, but he didn’t have time to question that phenomenon before he had another parade to lead, and then he was doing a split on top of some kind of huge tube, and then he fell off the tube but it didn’t hurt whatsoever and then he just laid on the ground panting and trying to process what had happened for a full minute.  
What. The. Fuck.  
“Musical numbers really do a number on ya,” said a familiar voice. It was Karen. “You’ll get used to it after a while. It’s like a drug or something.”  
“Tell me about it,” Cy mumbled, still facedown in the grass. Well, fake grass. “I don’t know if I like this world after all.”  
“It’s a lot.” Karen’s voice got soft. She was sitting next to him, he was pretty sure. He rolled himself over. “It’s really hard at first. I remember,” and she stopped talking, lost in thought.  
He looked up at her. The sun was sort of glowing through her hair. “How long have you been here?”  
“Oh, God, it’s hard to keep track. A few months, I think. But you should get up,” she patted him on the shoulder, “Alex will yell at you if you rest for this long.”  
“Alex?”  
“Oh, that’s O’Hare’s real name.”  
“I thought it was avaricious or something.”  
Karen laughed. “He wants people to call him that, but we all just call him Alex. It’s not like there’s that much he can do to us, and it pisses him off so much, so we all do it.”  
Cy got up and sighed deeply. If that performance hadn’t been enough to make him feel like he achieved his goal, he wasn’t sure what would.  
He finished the rest of his deliveries and went home, and tried to watch tv but it was all just commercials for “O’Hare air”, also known as the dumbest thing he had ever seen. But as the song that morning had said, the air here was not so clean. They bought it fresh. It came out this machine that dispensed it into houses.  
The next couple of days were pretty much the same as the first, with the song changing just a bit every time. He was getting used to it, and he was more careful not to fall in any manholes on subsequent mornings.  
A few days later, he went off his usual route a little bit when he saw a weird alley he’d never been down before. He got off his truck and walked down it, and then heard a familiar voice. O’Hare. Or Alex, apparently.  
“..fresh air to people.” Alex was saying. “Trees,” He made a weird dismissive groan. “They make it for free. So when I hear people talking about them I consider it kind of a threat to my business.” Yeah, thought Cy, and you seem like a threat to this entire town. Alex’s voice got quiet and sinister. “You listen to me, boy,” he hissed, “don’t go poking around in things you don’t understand, or I’ll be your worst nightmare.” YEESH. This guy was a straight-up monster! “I’m Frankenstein’s head on a spider’s body!” He screeched.  
“Yeah, um,” said a voice. A young voice. Like, a kid. He was talking this way to a little kid? Cy had heard enough. He snuck back into his truck, thinking hard. Alex was a dick for sure, but this was taking it so far! Why did he oppose this boy leaving town so much? Was it because he was Ted, maybe? The protagonist of the Lorax story? Why would he care about making sure that kid didn’t complete his arc? It wasn’t like that would affect the way O’Hare controlled everyone. Sure, trees made air. But trees cleaning the air would take a long time, right? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t ever been much of a science person. He needed to confront Alex on this later.  
The next morning, he interrupted the town song by getting into Alex’s fancy tube car that he used to get everywhere. It started to speed off, with the guards still standing on either side somehow.  
“What are you doing in here?” Alex yelled.  
“I heard you talking to that kid yesterday. It was pretty messed up, if you ask me.”  
“I just don’t want to- look, I don’t have to explain myself to you! Guards, get this lowly delivery guy out of here!” However, the guards were on the outside of the vehicle, and didn’t hear Alex say anything.  
“The guards aren’t real. They’re too stupid to protect you from me. And so all that counts right now,” Cy looked at himself, and then at Cy’s tiny body, “is physical strength.”  
“If my guards see us fighting, they’ll stop you, so don’t try me.”  
“Wanna bet?” He picked Alex up easily and pinned him against the wall. The guards didn’t move because apparently they really sucked at their jobs.  
“Alright, fine!” Alex looked genuinely panicked. “Look, I don’t know how much you heard, but if Ted brings trees in here it’s all over for me! My business is over, which means I’ll be trapped in this stupid cartoon world forever.”  
“But that won’t happen right away, purification of the air takes a long time!”  
“Are you sure about that? You a good biology student, Cy? Because I never was. I’m not taking any chances.” Cy wrestled one of his arms free from Cy’s grip and pressed a little button on the ceiling, and suddenly Cy was sailing through the air, and he could see Alex waving mockingly at him from inside the tube.  
He crashed into something and everything went black, but then he woke up in a hospital of some kind and felt completely fine. Also, Karen was there, which was nice.  
“You’re not hurt. Cartoon physics dictate that you can’t get actually hurt, just enough so it’s funny. Honestly just rip those tubes out of your arms, they’re totally useless.” Karen said it all matter-of-factly. Apparently this world had no patience for processing anything. All these sudden changes in atmosphere were giving him constant whiplash. He did, however, rip the tubes out of his arms and get up.  
The two of them walked out of the hospital, talking. The sun was about to set. Well, cartoonishly jump below the horizon, but that’s what you got in this universe.  
The next day, something truly crazy happened. Even when compared to everything else crazy in this world. The kid, who Karen informed him was Ted, the hero, got into a crazy car chase with Alex, which everyone watched intently. When they got into the center of town the kid took a dramatic stance above the crowd that had gathered, and held up a seed.  
A tree seed? A truffula tree seed? Did that mean he had talked to the Onceler already? He remembered that at the end of The Lorax the Onceler gave the boy a seed and told him to plant it to create change or something.  
The end of the book. Suddenly it all became clear in Cy’s mind. Before he had time to react, Alex was yelling at Cy to tell everyone his own opinion, “Or else you’re fired!”  
Fired? Hah, Alex didn’t have any power here! He’d already failed! It didn’t matter anymore.  
He had just realized that Alex had been lying to everyone the whole time. The point of this place wasn’t to fulfil a life goal, it was just for the story to be over! Not Cy’s story, or Karen’s story, or O’Hare’s story, but Ted’s! The story of The Lorax! And when the narrative of that reached its conclusion, they would be free.  
At least, he was pretty sure.  
But now as all these thoughts raced through his head, he realized that they were still waiting for him to say something.  
“You don’t know me,” he said, and was at peace with it. The story didn’t care who he was. “But my name’s Cy. I’m just the O’Hare delivery guy.” The kid walked over towards him, and Cy put a hand on his back as he sang that trees might be worth a try. “So i say, let it grow.”  
Suck it, Alex, you piece of shit, he thought. What are you gonna do now?  
To his credit, Alex looked incredibly confused, not even at anger yet because he was just- disgusted. Cy stared him down.  
The parents of a boy who GLOWED because of pollution sang about how their son’s glowing was “not good”, and Cy almost snorted. How stupid could these people be?  
The whole town started to join in! He’d done it, he’d helped Ted change everyone’s minds! And it had only taken, like, ten seconds.

Even Granny Norma, that poor, lost soul, began to join in, talking about how she remembered a time when nobody had to pay for air. Cy wanted to shake her awake but there would be time for that later. they were in the middle of an inspiring song. now was not the time.  
As everyone followed Ted and his family to the center green to plant the seed, Alex made one last plea for things to stay the same.  
“My name’s O’Hare, I’m one of you.” Yeah, okay. “I live here in Thneedville too.” Sure. Whatever. It didn’t matter what he said. The seed was about to be planted.  
“It could be time to start anew.” Hang on. what was he playing at here. “And maybe change my point of view…”  
Cy wasn’t buying it.  
“Nah,” Alex said nastily, “I say let it die!”  
Cy put his head in his hands. How could he possibly think that would work? the whole town had been singing Let it Grow for two minutes!  
“You greedy dirtbag!” Cy sang, as everyone circled around Alex and began closing in.  
They strapped Alex to some sort of head-jetpack and he flew off screaming. It was super weird but Cy couldn’t even feel bad because, as Alex himself had demonstrated earlier by ejecting him from a high-speed vehicle, he was going to be fine.  
The song they were all singing finished, and Ted dug a hole to put the seed in. Then a strangely familiar voice rang out through the air.  
“I am the lorax. I speak for the trees. And thank you for recreating the breeze.” That voice, it sounded familiar. “You want to go home now, I get it, goodbye. And so much of it thanks to a great man named Cy.”  
“Is that Danny Devito?” He whispered to Karen next to him.  
“No, it’s the lorax.” Karen winked at him as sparkles filled the air and the entire town started to cheer. As the sparkles settled, the world around them changed. They were back in the theater, and the sounds of bad singing echoed through the halls. Cy was now standing with a group of about fifteen people who all looked bewildered.  
There was a girl about his age standing next to him, with long red hair and freckles. “Cy?” She said.  
“Karen?”  
“Oh my god, you’re a cute boy now!” Cy’s face turned red, but then he remembered something.  
“Okay, who here is Alex, you’ve got some explaining to do.” He looked around accusingly at all the faces, and as he was doing so, a teen boy suddenly turned and bolted out of the backstage area and out the back doors that were conveniently right there and led to outside. They all watched, frozen, as he continued to sprint away.  
“Are you telling me O’Hare was some scrawny teenager this whole time?” one of the men asked.  
“Hey!” cried Cy.  
“Oh, sorry, I have nothing against scrawny teenagers, it’s just…. Jesus.”  
“I need a drink,” one of the women in the group said as she began to head out the same back door.


End file.
